When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, one of its most prominent and most controversial features was the on-screen keyboard. In as world dominated by devices with physical keyboards, it was seen as a joke, something that could never work. We know better by now, of course, but while I still prefer the physical feel and clicks of a real keyboard, a recent new endeavour of mine has made me appreciate the on-screen keyboard in a whole new way.

I was never much of a fan at first, but since I got my Nexus 7 I found I can type really fast on it. And it's certainly better to have an on-screen QWERTY on a phone than a numeric pad (which takes forever to type on).

I think that depends on the phone, the person, and the text. By the time I was looking for a replacement for my w580i (feature phone with a keypad slider), I was getting to be very proficient in T9 typing. I was much faster typing SMS messages on my T9 keypad than my friends were using the onscreen keyboard on their iPhones (1 and 3G).

Of course, my sister-in-law was faster at typing SMS messages on her feature phone *without* T9 (you know, tap the "2" key three times to show "c") than I was *with* T9!